Baseball Is More About Losing

Tonight, PBS aired the episode, Sixth Inning of Ken burn;s series, Baseball. For Ken Burns, baseball and the happenings in the sport during the period from 1941 to 1947 are iconic of what was going on in America during those significantly eventful years. One observation about baseball especially stuck in my mind. The narrator said that most people think that baseball is mostly about winning. He continued, they are wrong. Baseball is more about losing.. Batters are able to hit the ball only a third of the time. Major league teams usually lose more games than they win. But just because a batter may strike out, he doesn't quit the team. Just because a team loses a game, the team doesn't withdraw from the league in disgrace. They just try to do better the next time.


Lately, a lot of things which never grabbed my attention very much seem more compelling subjects to think about. Baseball certainly falls into that category, a subject not hugely interesting to me until now. Ken Burn's series on baseball changes how I perceive it now because he has made the people and the events in baseball powerful metaphors for the day-to-day realities we have to eventually face. Especially this notion that baseball is a lot about losing. 


Why is that? Well, the real question confronting us is: Which experience transforms us more, winning or losing? The answer is losing. Playing baseball, living our lives or being in business are mostly about the journey, rather than specific things that happen to us. For better or for worse, we learn how to make our way in the world by trial and error. Sometimes the things we do work and sometimes they don't. If something doesn't work, we figure out what we could have done better and work on what we will do the next time. Over time, if we are focused and committed... if we are serious about putting in the best effort which we are capable of doing, we might even become really great in our field. But in truth, it is not about being great. It is about always getting better at what we do, than we are today. 


When we finally achieve a notable victory in our life or in playing baseball, that moment of success is a milestone in our life. But the real story which needs to be told is about all the times things which did not work out for us leading up to that victory. In business, it is the sales we did not make or the jobs we did not get. It is about the mistakes we made which cost us a deal or caused us to lose a valuable business connection. It is mostly about what we learned from our mistakes as we honed our skills, until the day that we finally got good enough to seize the day. 


Everyone knows that sales is a numbers game. One will get one sale out of "x" number of presentations. So is getting a job. One will have to go through so many interviews before some company will make a job offer. In the case of making sales presentations, we test out our presentation on the first few potential customers. And we refine our presentation and refine our selling skills. We get better at making the presentation and in closing the sale. We make a sale. We have our milestone. To make the next sale takes fewer presentations, because we have become a more effective sales person.


But winning a game or making the sale is not the end of the story. That victory is just one event in the journey. Not only that, a certain truth comes into play. In fact and in the way we will be perceived by others, we are really only as good as we are today. Even if we were doing great things yesterday, we must now focus on doing the best we can do today. Tomorrow, we will face the same challenge all over again, whether or not we succeeded today. 


In reality, we are always living in the moment. As such, our focus and our commitment must be on what we are doing this day, this  hour... this very moment. Whatever we are doing, we should be looking to do our best and to realize our full potential. Hopefully, we will enjoy some level of success in business today and get the sale or the contract. All things being equal, we will complete a project on schedule and the client will pay us in a timely manner. And ideally, we will make some kind of difference in the world. 


But there will never be guarantees that we will win today's battle. Odds are we are likely to lose more times than we win. So in business, it is also mostly about losing the battles, but still holding our own in spite of it. So we can borrow from Ken Burn's analogy of baseball to grow as individuals and to become more competent in business with each passing day. We can use this thought to build our businesses better and stronger. We just have to remember that every time we don't win, we are really just one step closer to getting our next client or making the next sale.